Completely biased reviews and fangirling

Tag Archives: Flash Review

The experience of watching this show is similar to what I imagine it would be like, to be on an exceptional winning streak in your favorite computer game: you are in disbelief as you clear round after round, trouncing the system in ways that you didn’t think possible. You start to wonder if you will – gasp! – actually be able to pull off a perfect game – a feat that is only rumored to be possible. You make it to the final rounds – OMG am I almost there?! – ..only for the system to beat you in the end, after all. *sadface*

And then you console yourself that, yes, you didn’t make it all the way through this time, but you still did really well – and maybe, just maybe, you’ll make it next time.

Sigh. That’s how I feel about this show, you guys. There was so much to love in this one, and it felt so surprisingly fresh in so many ways, that I thought we might actually have a thoroughly amazing drama on our hands. Alas, Show wobbled a fair bit in its final episodes, to my eyes. I’m disappointed about that, but just like in the analogy of the computer game, I’m consoling myself that being awesome for 14 episodes is still head and shoulders above most other dramas. Right?

If you’ve read my recent posts, you’d probably know that of late, I’ve been bucking the trend in terms of not loving shows that everyone else seems to love. I was really kinda bummed that even though J-drama Rich Man, Poor Woman and C-drama Shan Shan Comes To Eat are crowd favorites, they just never became one of my favorites.

Well whaddya know. I’m bucking the trend again, with this show. But this time, it’s a happier event for me (woot!), coz while lots of folks seemed to be pretty underwhelmed by 20th Century Boy and Girl, I actually really liked this one, you guys. And I mean, in a solid, I’m-sorry-to-say-goodbye kinda way, too.

Maybe with the right lens, you might also end up liking this one. You never know?

I conclude that I might be one of maybe 3 people in the entire dramaverse who doesn’t love this drama to bits.

I really wanted to like this one, especially after long-time drama pal DDee told me that she loved this so much that she felt like going right back to the beginning of this show, once she got to the end. In my experience, that’s serious high praise for any drama, and not to be taken lightly. So I promptly moved Rich Man, Poor Woman to the top of my watch list and dived right in.

Sadly, I never felt the same kind of love for this show that just about everyone else seems to have. I do concede that Oguri Shun can be very sexy, though.

Expectations count for a lot in drama-watching, I’ve come to find. If a show exceeds your expectations, it’s always a happy thing. But if a show doesn’t live up to your expectations, it can feel like a real disappointment. The problem is, expectations can be.. a rather tricky thing to manage.

Lots of drama friends – bloggers and readers alike – had recommended this show to me, and all of them had enthusiastically assured me that this one was Stinkin’ Cute, and that I would absolutely love it. That kind of created a bit of a challenge for Show, since with all that glowing praise, my expectations unconsciously inched higher with each positive pronouncement I heard about it.

That then inadvertently put Show on an instant uphill task in my head. From the first minute I dipped my toes into this watch, Show had to prove itself worthy of all the squee. And that’s an unnecessary challenge that just helps nobody, amiright?

…Which is why I’m here to help. I’ll help manage your expectations so that hopefully you’ll end up enjoying your watch more easily than I did. We drama fans gotta help one another out, after all. 😉

It was a pretty great drama year, serving up a good number of shows that I truly enjoyed, like Arang and the Magistrate, The King 2 Hearts, Gaksital, and Padam Padam, among many others. On top of that, 2012 was also the year I decided to try my hand at the whole drama blogging thing – and hey, look at where we are now, eh?

But. There is one thing that I kinda hold against 2012.. coz 2012 is the year that time travel took over the dramaverse. Suddenly, it felt like time travel was everywhere.Queen In-hyun’s Man, Rooftop Prince, Faith, Dr. Jin, and even Operation Proposal all got in on the time travel action in 2012, with varying degrees of success. Let me just say that there’s nothing inherently wrong with using time travel as a concept, but honestly, it now kinda feels like time travel has become the Trend That Will Not Die.

For the record, I’m not hating on The Best Hit. In fact, I even rather enjoyed this show. It’s just that the whole time travel thing here feels particularly gratuitous – almost pointless, even. I personally feel that this show didn’t need the time travel conceit, to tell the slice-of-life, found-family story it wanted to tell. In fact, Show might’ve been better off just picking one time period and staying there. A pretty novel concept these days, I know. 😉

YOU GUYS. Remember how much I loved Answer Me 1988? (Hint: a lot, with cherries & rainbows on top)

Well, it’s like Answer Me 1988’s slightly older, rougher-around-the-edges cousin came to visit, and proved to be almost as engaging and endearing – just in a much more compact package. At just 8 episodes, I found myself rationing out this show’s episodes like they were the last few morsels in a box of very, very special truffles that someone had brought from an exotic, faraway place; the kind that I can’t simply go out to the store to get more of, once it’s all gone. And now, this is all gone.

I’d randomly picked this one up in the thick of my drama rut, and really got into it for a while. But then, this show stopped working for me in a whole lotta ways, and I then suffered quite a bit of viewer’s regret for dragging myself to the finish line, in (futile, futile) hopes that this one would pick back up.

Remorseful, I was going to file this one away in a corner of my brain, in the “bad decisions I’d rather not think about” pile, but then today, I realized that I really ought to at least warn you guys about this one, since we’re friends and all. Right?

Thanks to my recent kdrama rut, I’ve been poking around more actively to explore new and different drama pastures, and I’m happy to report that my adventures have turned out some very positive viewing experiences.

I promise that I’ll be back soon with more kdrama reviews (I’m still watching ’em, just in fewer numbers), but in the meantime, here’s a quick little review on a quiet little charmer of a Jdrama that I probably would’ve never stumbled upon, if not for my kdrama rut.

You know a show’s gotta be Quite Something, if it’s luring me out of the writing-hiatus-cum-drama-rut I’ve found myself ensconced in for the last couple of months.

I literally just finished watching the last episode of Father Is Strange today, and liked it enough to start poking around to craft a review right away. Considering that 1, Father Is Strange is a 52-episode family drama, and 2, I’ve been feeling pretty uninspired on both the writing and drama fronts, this is a Big Testament to how likable I’ve found this show and its characters.

Even if you’re not usually into family dramas, I really do think you might like this one.

The interesting thing about my adventures in in-flight entertainment, is that I never quite know what I’ll stumble onto. Not all of my in-flight picks are good ones, to be sure. But sometimes, I find a gem that I probably would’ve never watched if I hadn’t been a captive audience on a flight.

Today, I randomly decided that I was in the mood for a bit of Chinese nostalgia, and picked Under The Hawthorn Tree without knowing much about it at all. Essentially, all I knew about this movie, was that it was set in the past, that it involved a girl who went to the countryside and fell in love with a boy, and that it was directed by famed director Zhang Yimou.

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